Telecommunications costs have become a major expense for many large businesses and other organizations. Today's competitive business climate requires immediate communications between components of an organization and between the organization and its suppliers and customers. This need alone has produced over the last twenty years a dramatic increase in the use of traditional telecommunications services such as ordinary switched telephone service, leased-line telephone service and telex, typically provided by wireline common carriers. In addition, many non-traditional modes of electronic communications, such as facsimile and a variety of computer networking schemes use, as a transmission medium, either traditional or new telecommunications services offered by wireline carriers.
Organizations are under great pressure to reduce telecommunications costs while continuing to make available to their personnel and correspondents telecommunications services of acceptable quality and quantity. In order to minimize costs, attention is increasingly focused on analysis and processing of call-detail records to discover waste, unauthorized use, and savings opportunities which may arise from more efficient selection of carrier facilities.
For example, lengthy calls from a particular station may indicate inappropriate or inefficient use of the telephone by authorized personnel. A large number of calls to a particular geographical region may indicate that leased lines or tie-lines are economically justified. Since many telecommunications services are priced on a distance- and time-of-day-sensitive basis, and since several telecommunications carriers provide differing calling and volume discount plans, customers may avail themselves of additional savings opportunities by appropriately routing traffic over the lowest cost facilities and by contracting for special discounts based on usage information obtained from such analyses. A further requirement for call-detail record processing is to permit large organizations to pass along telecommunications charges to the originating department or other internal unit.
Such analysis and processing is hampered, because even large-volume telecommunications customers typically now receive a paper bill itemizing long-distance calls and other telecommunications charges by originating station. This paper bill is often the exclusive means by which the customer may obtain detailed information concerning telephone calls and other transactions from which charges arise. Further analysis is usually not provided by the carrier.
In order to process and analyze call-detail information on their own, customers have adopted a variety of techniques, but each of these has significant disadvantages. The information on a bill may be analyzed using non-automated methods, but these methods are not feasible for large customers, and even for the smallest customers are extremely expensive and error-prone. Since automated processing is preferred, some customers manually key-punch or machine-scan the paper bill into a computer system. While this approach somewhat reduces the cost of the analysis, the data entry steps remain expensive and error-prone.
Other customers may receive from the carrier a machine-readable tape containing call-detail records, but to the inventors' knowledge these tapes either carry unrated call information (i.e. the records do not include the cost of the call) or lack certain rating details without which it is impossible to exactly reconcile information on the tape with the paper bill. In addition, the type of tape media used, and the manner in which the information is organized on such tapes, require that an expensive mainframe-class computer be used to analyze the data.
Apparatus has also been developed which may be continuously connected to each outgoing station, telephone line or similar facility used by the customer and which records certain details concerning every outgoing transaction or call made over that facility. The records thereby produced may then be processed by a computer to apply an appropriate rating algorithm and arrive at an approximate cost for each transaction. However, since the customer's recording equipment is not identical to the equipment used by the carrier to acquire call-detail records, some discrepancies are virtually sure to occur, and these discrepancies will be propagated to the final results of the analysis. In addition, since the carrier's calling plans and tariffs may change frequently, a great deal of effort is required on the part of the customer to maintain up-to-date and otherwise accurate rating algorithms for processing the records.
Accordingly, the need exists for a system which provides to large-volume telecommunications customers the ability to conveniently and affordably analyze and manipulate call-detail and other telecommunications transaction information by computer, and which provides results which exactly correspond with the information printed on the customer's paper bill.